Musings on a poetic puzzlement: Norman K. Denzin and T.S. Eliot

Abstract

In 2005, Norman K. Denzin founded the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) which for nearly two decades served as the home base for a global social justice community rooted in critical inquiry and guided by Denzin's utopian vision. Each year, he welcomed delegates to ICQI with a stanza from T.S. Eliot's poem, Little Gidding. Denzin's death in 2023 left many of his followers wondering: Why was this passage so meaningful to him? In this mediation, I explore that question by engaging with Eliot's poem. Written in the context of World War II, Little Gidding reflects on the human condition and the enigma of timelessness. Despite its somber context, the poem offers a hopeful vision of the human condition. I focus on four passages in which Eliot wrestles with: the inevitability of place, reconciliation at the intersection of opposites, the appearance of a compound ghost of knowledge, and the final resolution of humanity's paradisal origins with its heavenly destiny. Drawing parallels between Eliot and Denzin, Little Gidding and ICQI, I suggest that it is not so difficult to see why the poem might have spoken to Denzin. I argue, Denzin transformed Eliot's Christian meditation into a secular call for earthly action--an ethos embodied in the spirit, practice and place of ICQI.